Is it okay to feel GOOD?

Is it okay to feel good? Is it okay to be FIRED UP? Do we spend enough time genuinely recognizing the joy that is the teaching profession?

I mean I just got done with an IMMENSE amount of work. Papers, lesson plans, a trip to Jacksonville, Florida where I did a student assembly for a few hundred at-risk middle school kids about the value of school, education and making good choices (a total HOME-RUN, btw... I mean kids are kids are kids and anyone who doesn't think so, doesn't really know teens very well at all. They may put up masks, but inside they love to laugh, be inspired and feel validated!).

So does the crappy hotel bed, the 3 hour layover in Atlanta, the fact that every seat on the plane was taken on my way home and I had a dude the size of an NBA basketball player sit in the middle seat next to me for the flight across country bother me?

Well, it does if I let it -- but if I focus on how great it feels to have just done a heck of a lot of hard, good professional work as the end of the month approaches, well... there's value in that. Deep value.

Loving your job is spectacularly important and if you don't remember to acknowledge and honor the love, and relish in the hard, strenuous, push you to the edge work, now and then, you are gonna burn out.

But if you do, you get forged into steel. Just like metal, the heat of our job can burn the impurities away. Remember what it's all about. That's the fountain of our strength!